In a brief gloss, MacKenzie leans toward conflation, code acts, is performative, extends its action beyond its executables to culture but not as far maybe as Parikka (or not as far explicitly into labor), and does not separate its inscription from execution (or then impact or imaginary) as Chun does. Galloway emphasizes the hierarchical aspects of this separation, linking them to ideological/spiritual telos, albeit tangled, while Keeling in a way instrumentalizes all of the above into a call to action to undermine it, shift its orientations. Or perhaps it works backward and says that ideology is software (rather than the other way around) and different, better versions should be applied when designing and running our technologies.
I tend to fall in the Keeling & Chun camps (stan, scholarly heart eyes emoji), but my critical reading style is “yes, and” so I looked for what concepts some of the other authors also brought to the mix that could be useful (to at least my thinking): I’m interested in MacKenzie’s “wavering line between code object and code subject (81). Setting aside the typical “tech bro” subject, how does the creation of code objects reinstantiate code subjects? Also his focus on citation & circulation, as constitutive acts, as erasure (and consumption vs reconfigurability). What is created & covered over by this repetition? (78). Does this cite Derrida’s “Signature Event Context”? (D talks of “coded” iterable models that are “identifiable as citation.” Interestingly ritual also comes up here, as it does in Chun.)
In Parikka, I was also interested in the creation of subjects, the distributed self as applied to software logics—people as computational units, and computers as brain/subjectivity units. He teases out the human logics embedded in the logics of software design, project management, team management (“metaprogramming”), which also feeds back into other forms of human-work design—and particularly also embeds in all kinds of language around that (46). Parikka also brings back the limits of bodies, different kinds of bodies (Fuller/Goffey’s “evil media studies” and “gray media,” would like to know more about this) through his focus on the mundane exhaustive labor of software as opposed to self-expression and creation. Finally, “cultural techniques” ties together brains, techniques, technologies, infrastructures/organizations, workflows, abstractions in a way that could be useful to bring back to thinking about ideology and the kinds of things that code executes.
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